The sheriff knew well the hypocrisy of the sentiment with which Rivers concluded, but made no remark.  A single smile testified his knowledge of the nature of his colleague, and indicated his suspicion of a deeper and different motive for this new activity.  Approaching the outlaw closely, he asked, in a half whisper:—­

“Who was the witness of the murder—­who could swear for the magistrate?  You must get somebody to do that.”

This was another point which Rivers, in his impatience, had not thought to consider.  But fruitful in expedient, his fertile mind suggested that ground of suspicion was all that the law required for apprehension at least, and having already arranged that the body of the murdered man should be found under certain circumstances, he contented himself with procuring commissions, as deputies, for his two officers, and posted away to the village.

Here, as he anticipated, the intelligence had already been received—­the body of Forrester had been found, and sufficient ground for suspicion to authorize a warrant was recognised in the dirk of the youth, which, smeared with blood as it had been left by Rivers, had been found upon the body.  Rivers had but little to do.  He contrived, however, to do nothing himself.  The warrant of Pippin, as magistrate, was procured, and the two officers commissioned by the sheriff went off in pursuit of the supposed murderer, against whom the indignation of all the village was sufficiently heightened by the recollection of the close intimacy existing between Ralph and Forrester, and the nobly characteristic manner in which the latter had volunteered to do his fighting with Rivers.  The murdered man had, independent of this, no small popularity of his own, which brought out for him a warm and active sympathy highly creditable to his memory.  Old Allen, too, suffered deeply, not less on his own than his daughter’s account.  She, poor girl, had few words, and her sorrow, silent, if not tearless, was confined to the solitude of her own chamber.

In the prosecution of the affair against Ralph, there was but one person whose testimony could have availed him, and that person was Lucy Munro.  As the chief particular in evidence, and that which established the strong leading presumption against him, consisted in the discovery of his dagger alongside the body of the murdered man, and covered with his blood; it was evident that she who could prove the loss of the dagger by the youth, and its finding by Munro, prior to the event, and unaccompanied by any tokens of crime, would not only be able to free the person suspected, at least from this point of suspicion, but would be enabled to place its burden elsewhere, and with the most conclusive distinctness.

This was a dilemma which Rivers and Munro did not fail to consider.  The private deliberation, for an hour, of the two conspirators, determined upon the course which for mutual safety they were required to pursue; and Munro gave his niece due notice to prepare for an immediate departure with her aunt and himself, on some plausible pretence, to another portion of the country.